Monday, October 24, 2005

As you may have heard, we're updating our AdWords login system to Google Accounts. Starting in early November, you and your clients will be invited to update your account(s).

By updating your account, you will be able to establish multiple logins for your AdWords accounts, leverage change history to gain visibility into what changes users are making, and address the security risks and management hassles associated with shared logins.

Since you share access to your AdWords account with your clients, we wanted to pass along some best practices for updating shared accounts.

In early November, you will be asked to begin the update process (you have until January 15, 2006 to do so). In order to ensure a smooth process that provides uninterrupted access for you and your clients, we recommend that you and your clients review the following information.

Best Practices – Updating shared AdWords logins

Be sure to select “No. I might manage this AdWords account with others” during the first step of the update process

Create a new username and password that is different from the current AdWords username and password

Please advise your client to go through this same process (separate from you), and advise them to:

Choose a *different* username/password than you have

Avoid using their personal email address as their Google Account, but rather use their business or another professional email account as their login

Update your API headers as soon as possible to ensure that future API requests use your new Google Accounts login

Note: if you are accessing a client’s account via a My Client Center (MCC) account, be sure to also request that your client provide you with their new username so you can update your API headers accordingly.

Complete this update as soon as possible. While all AdWords users will not be required to update their account(s) for the next few months, we strongly suggest that you complete the process in early November, especially with the busy holiday season ahead of us.

While we are changing the AdWords login system, you will not need to re-code your existing applications. In most cases (as noted above), you will have to update your API headers to route future API requests to your new Google Accounts usernames and passwords.

While you and your clients will still be able to use your old account logins for the next several months (provided neither of you disable the old login), the old logins will be disabled automatically in early 2006. If for some reason you are still using the old login at that time, we will send you an email alert several weeks before we disable the login.

Best Practices Web Seminars

Finally, in order to ensure that you and your client account teams are well educated on the update process, we have scheduled two best practices web seminars. If you would like to learn more about these best practices and the overall update process, please join us for one of these two events:

We hope you find this best practices guide helpful. Feel free to visit the AdWords API Developer Forum to share your experiences and questions with fellow API developers during the update process. And as always, we’ll also post any relevant information on the Forum and the AdWords API blog.

Thank you for your continued support of Google AdWords and the AdWords API.